The University of Colorado School of Medicine is part of the Anschutz Medical Campus, the nation’s newest health care campus, located in Aurora, Colo.
One of four University of Colorado campuses, it sits on a square mile of land that formerly housed Fitzsimons Army Medical Center. It is located about eight miles east of downtown Denver at Interstate 225 and Colfax Avenue.
The school offers a four-year program leading to an MD degree and is the state’s only allopathic medical school. The school also includes a Child Health Associate/Physician Assistant (CHAPA) degree and a doctor Physical Therapy degree. Both are three-year programs. The Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) awards both MD and PhD degrees.
Origins
The school was founded in Boulder, Colo., in 1883 with two students and two professors. A move in 1911 to leave Boulder for the state capital of Denver capped a decades-long struggle to see which of Colorado’s four turn-of-the-20th-century medical schools would survive.
When the School of Medicine tried to send its Boulder-based students to Denver for training (Boulder did not have enough clinical opportunities), officials at the private University of Denver Medical College and Gross Medical College and the Denver Homeopathic Medical College cried foul.
The private schools took the state university to court and won. The university’s state charter said all teaching had to be done in Boulder. But an amendment to the state constitution in 1912 allowed the School of Medicine to teach its third- and fourth-year students in Denver.
In 1924, the entire four-year medical school moved from Boulder to a new campus in Denver near Colorado Boulevard and Ninth Avenue. The quadrangle of red brick buildings housed a medical school, a nursing school and a public teaching hospital that cared for the poor.
As the millennium approached, leaders realized the school was outgrowing the facility. So when the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center closed in 1999, the university closed a deal to shift all its health sciences schools and colleges there. The move was completed in 2008.
There are about 600 MD students at the school, plus 352 in the Physical Assistant and Physical Therapy programs and 975 in Graduate Medical Education. The Admissions Department received about 5,400 MD applications for the 2012-13 school year; 160 first-year students are accepted.
Education curriculum is divided into four phases: the Essentials Core (Phases I & II), the Clinical Core (Phase III) and Advanced Studies (Phase IV).
Woven through all phases are four Threads that integrate over-arching topics into the curriculum: Culturally Effective Medicine; Evidence-Based Medicine and Medical Informatics; Humanities, Ethics, & Professionalism; and Medicine & Society.
The school offers several educational tracks including:
- Global Health Track: Teaching international medicine with classroom and global experiences.
- Leadership, Education and Advocacy Development Scholarship: (LEADS) Emphasizing the social, cultural & economic antecedents of health and illness.
- Research Track: Providing students with in-depth long-term exposure to research.
- Rural Track:Giving students a broad and rich experience in rural medicine.
- Women's Care Track:Addressing patients’ gender-based health needs, no matter the specialty.
The school is affiliated with Children’s Hospital Colorado, ranked as the fifth best children’s hospital by U.S. News & World Report, and the University of Colorado Hospital, which was ranked the best academic medical center in the nation in 2011 by University HealthSystem Consortium, an alliance of the country’s top nonprofit academic centers. Both hospitals are on the Anschutz campus.
Other affiliates include Denver Health, ranked the sixth best academic medical center by University HealthSystem Consortium; National Jewish Health, ranked as the country's best respiratory hospital for 14 years; and the Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, which is building an $800 million campus adjacent to the campus. The new center is expected to open in 2015.
Research grants to the School of Medicine totaled nearly $400 million in fiscal year 2010-11. Major research and clinical centers at the school include the Altitude Research Center, Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes, University of Colorado Cancer Center, Charles C. Gates Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Biology Center and Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome.
The Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI), a $76 million statewide health initiative to quickly apply laboratory breakthroughs to the lives of citizens, makes its headquarters at Anschutz. A $30 million Health and Wellness Center is opening in 2012.
Since its inception in 1887, the School of Medicine bylaws have required that women be accepted for admission on an equal basis with men.
Nelly Mayo graduated in 1891 and became the School of Medicine’s first female alumni. Portraits of early medical school classes show that women and minorities were well-represented among classes in the early 1900s.
The actual number of women and minorities stayed relatively fixed as class sizes grew. But a major shift occurred in the 1970s, and in 2012, women will outnumber men in the school’s graduating class.
As for racial diversity at the school, the university administration expanded pipeline programs in 2010 geared toward middle- and high-school students with backgrounds underrepresented at the school including those based on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, rural and urban and military service. Pipeline programs include:
– BA/BS-MD
– Summer Health Careers Institute
– Pre-Collegiate Health Careers Program
– Undergraduate Pre-Health Program
In addition, the Admissions Office expanded its outreach. As a result, the class of 2015 will be the most diverse class matriculated in the School of Medicine’s history with one-third of its students classified as under-represented minorities.